Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday March 14, 2013 @10:30AM
from the expected-lies-and-got-some dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Geek.com: "Ever since SimCity launched, there has been a suspicion that the need for the game to always be connected to a server was mainly a form of DRM, not for social game features and multiplayer. Then a Maxis developer came forward to confirm the game doesn't actually need a server to function, suggesting the information coming out of EA wasn't the whole truth. Now EA and Maxis have some explaining to do as a modder has managed to get the game running offline indefinitely." The writer names a few small ways in which the game is actually improved by being offline, too.

That's because it was most likely reviewed by a copy given to publishers and other reviewers prior to retail. There was no stress to bear on their cloud when it was just a few reviewers testing the product, so everything went smooth. But when it came time for the floodgates to open, the cons of their cloud-centered setup got exposed. This is one those situations where when it works, it's all fine and dandy, but when it doesn't, it crashes and burns for just about everyone.

Reviewers conducted their initial reviews on private EA servers. That should have been a factor made clear in every review.

Going forward, I think reviewers -- and game "journalists" in general -- are going to have to be more skeptical when dealing with publishers' PR flacks. Hopefully this will teach them to do that, because apparently Blizzard's "Error 37" fsck-up didn't. Then again, the "Error 37" was a pretty minor glitch compared to this.

The thing about persistent-online game (including MMO) reviews is that you can't really review the most important aspect of the game until after the game ships and people begin playing. Any review of such games is really just a preview, and mostly a graphics, game mechanics one at that.

Reviews need to stop calling such previews "reviews" and call them by what they are. Once the game is launched, they then should go back to do an actual review of the game. That's how things should be done anyway. Getting a preview mislabeled as a "review" out of the door faster than everybody else seems to trump the disservice they are doing to their readership.

Additionally, here's another story produced by WebProNews [webpronews.com], based on the RockPaperShotgun article produced a day earlier. From the story:

This week, Stephanie Perotti, Ubisoft’s worldwide director for online games, confirmed in an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun that Ubisoft has ditched always-on DRM. In fact, the company hasn’t implemented such tactics in over a year. Ubisoft’s policy is now to require only a one-time activiation when a game is first installed. In addition, the company now allows gamers to activate a game on as many PCs as they want. Perotti stated that Ubisoft changed its policy based on feedback from its customers.

SimCity 4 has a similar fundamental flaw in its traffic model that you describe. The SHORTEST route always won out, regardless of whether or not it was the FASTEST route, or HIGHEST-CAPACITY route. Every city you make in SC4 will have that same issue.

Well, they do until you have enough of that nonsense and install the Network Addon Mod ("network", in this case, meaning "traffic network"). Just ignore all the neat-looking highway and other traffic stuff they give you; the mod's MAIN draw is fixing the damn traffic model so that speed and capacity are more heavily weighted than just distance. I've had SC4 cities where I was getting constant traffic problems related to stupid sims, most roads entirely in the red density, and then I installed NAM and found everything right back to green. Now if I have problems on roads, I can trace down logical reasons why (so it turns out an onramp near an industrial center is a commuter hotspot, big deal).

What I'm saying is that apparently whatever dev team EA forced to wear Maxis's rotting corpse as a disguise STILL can't figure out traffic models worth a damn (SC4 was the first SimCity post-buyout). And that someone will make a mod that fixes it. Still, not a good scenario for EA.